A Look Back at Sony’s Overblown PlayStation 3 Promises

On Wednesday evening, Sony will present a glamorous press briefing in New York City that is almost certain to be the debut of its next PlayStation home console.

New console announcements, by their nature, are full of promises. Some of them are relatively small things, and some sound impossibly grandiose. And veteran game industry followers know that it’s important to take each one of them with a grain of salt. In an effort to generate buzz for their new machine, companies will often resort to half-truths and outright lies to get consumers excited.

As we get ready for Sony’s big announcement, let’s take a look back at the promises it made in 2005 and 2006 prior to the launch of PlayStation 3, to find out how well they’ve held up over the ensuing eight years.

“We are happy to announce that PlayStation 3 will have backward compatibility…” — former Sony Computer Entertainment chairman Ken Kutaragi

Backward compatibility has always been the exception rather than the rule for game consoles. PlayStation 2 won praise for allowing players access to their entire PS1 libraries, which went a long way toward winning over new converts and keeping them entertained in the traditionally dry early years of a console’s life.

So naturally, Sony was excited to bring this feature back for the PlayStation 3, which had a PS2 processor on the motherboard to run games perfectly. But it came with an expiration date — a very early one. As a controversial cost-cutting measure, the PlayStation 3 that Sony launched in Europe only had software-based backward compatibility, meaning that many games didn’t work and many more were broken and buggy. And by mid-2007 Sony had introduced this model in the U.S. as well, discontinuing the truly backward-compatible models and making them expensive collector’s items today.

Verdict: True, but only if you paid $600 within the first six months, otherwise false

“The PlayStation 3 is going to be a console that’s going to be with you again for 10 years.” — then-SCE America head Kaz Hirai in a 2006 interview with 1up.

A lot of gamers chuckled at Sony when Kaz Hirai mentioned that Sony was aiming for a 10-year lifespan for the PlayStation 3. Prior to this console generation, five years was about as long as a console could last you. Many people wrongly assumed that Hirai was saying that Sony’s next console wouldn’t be released until 2016. To be fair, it’s a lot closer to 2016 than we imagined it would be at the time. Who knew that this console generation would be the longest one ever?

What Hirai meant was that PS3 games and consoles would continue to be sold on store shelves even after PS4’s release. And at this point, it seems all but certain PS3 will survive for at least another two years, seeing holiday price cuts and new games. Considering that the PS2 just ended its 13-year run on shelves in late December, a 10-year life for PS3 seems like a modest prediction.

Verdict: Likely true

“Our next video is a small sampling of new games and future franchises being born on PS3.” — Kaz Hirai introducing a demo reel at Sony’s E3 2005 PS3 reveal.

Rewatching the 2005 and 2006 press conferences in which Sony debuted the PS3 is still amazing today. The games they show off still look incredible even by 2013 standards. The problem is that many of them don’t exist.

Of the games that Sony showed, many — Ni-Oh, Eyedentity, Fifth Phantom Saga, Killing Day, Eight Days — never made it to store shelves. And some others changed considerably before release, like Resistance: Fall of Man. Sony also spent a bafflingly long time talking up Gran Turismo 4, which wouldn’t be released for four and a half years.

“This is real gameplay everyone’s seeing out there.” — SCEA then-vice president Jack Tretton in an interview with IGN.

By far Sony’s biggest problem during the PS3’s debut was misrepresentation of software. Sony developed a bad habit of saying a demo was “real gameplay,” then years later recanting. As it unveils its next game machine this evening, be on the lookout for games that look too good to be true, because they probably are. Sony has been very fond of using pre-rendered CG movies that show off the “potential” of what is possible on new platforms. The most egregious example of this was the trailer for the never-released shooter Eight Days, which actually had a faux user interface laid over the top of the video.

When Sony first announced the PlayStation 3, it got applause from the E3 crowd for a laundry list of features that never made it into the final system. Few people mourned these, because frankly nobody really needed two HDMI ports.

In this case, it seems like Sony simply announced the console a bit too early into the design process, and they ended up cutting several of these features before the system launched. Wi-Fi is almost a standard feature on the PS3, but it did not ship with the 20GB model of the system at launch. It’s important to keep in mind that the design of the console may not be finalized, even if Sony pretends it is.

The bit about using 7 controllers simultaneously turned out to be true, but it’s been used very rarely over the system’s lifespan. As far as we can tell it’s only ever been used in one simplistic downloadable racing game and a few sports titles.

Verdict: False

“The possibility of creating a GMS, a global map system, users will be invited to upload their data. Users will start with all the pieces of information in their living room, their favorite restaurant, their school…. This is not just a pipe dream. You can enjoy the data in real time. You can fly through the landscape in real time.” — Ken Kutaragi in his Tokyo Game Show 2006 keynote.

Ken Kutaragi became known in some gaming circles as Crazy Ken as a result of his penchant for semi-delusional psychobabble like the quote you just read above. Here, Kutaragi spoke at length about the PS3’s potential for creating a 2006 global map system that would render 2013’s Google Maps laughably obsolete.

He also went on to explain how gamers would map the insides of their homes and offices, which would allow game developers easy access to cheap game levels. I’m honestly not sure if this part of the speech was a prank that didn’t translate well. Or maybe it was an elaborate parody of himself. Any way you slice it, this claim was false. If it’s not false, then Sony headquarters is hiding the technology to digitize the entire planet.

Verdict: False

“I believe it represents a huge chunk of our users who will be very excited by Home and what that means for their socialization, communication, customization, and being able to live in this great 3-D space that is Home.” — then-Sony Worldwide Studios head Phil Harrison in a March 2007 interview with GameReactor.

This is undoubtedly a subjective statement, as much of it depends on what he meant by “huge chunk.” However, there aren’t many people who are willing to say at this point that PlayStation Home, a Second Life-style virtual online world, was a big success for Sony.

These days the free service is used by a seemingly small niche of users who are apparently fond of bizarre micro-transactions like body paint and skimpy kimonos. This wasn’t exactly what Sony promised back when the service launched. It was meant to usher in a new era for videogaming that merged the social aspects of Second Life while becoming a centerpiece of the PlayStation Network strategy.

Instead, we can’t even remember the last time Sony mentioned Home in public.

Verdict: False

“Over the next two to three years, the network must live together with packaged media must come together. For large content distribution we must use packaged media for the time being. But eventually a new situation will arrive.” — Ken Kutaragi in his poorly translated Tokyo Game Show 2006 keynote speech.

Kutaragi seems to have thought the shift to downloadable console games would happen a lot faster than it actually did, but his general idea was accurate. The switch away from retail-based game sales to downloadable games has been achingly slow over the past seven years.

Console gaming has lagged far behind PC gaming, and other businesses like the music and movie industries which have already gone beyond downloadable entertainment and into streaming. Microsoft and Sony need to keep good relationships with retail chains because they need to sell their hardware in local stores. These days, however, most major PS3 games are available to be purchased and downloaded directly to the PS3. It will take quite a few more years to complete the transition to 100 percent digital, however.

Nearly seven years ago, Sony faced many of the same accusations Microsoft is facing today. Namely, some alleged that they were conspiring to kill the resale of used games at stores like GameStop and eBay by implementing strict digital rights management that tied each game to a single console.

Sony flatly denied these rumors and even seemed confused and frustrated that the rumor refused to go away. That was in 2006, and we can clearly see today that the rumors were false. However, the rumor was never killed. It has survived to this day and moved to new hosts.

Verdict: True

“Sony wants to keep that entrepreneurial, pushing-the-envelope spirit on the creative side of things but with a strong backbone supporting the business side, so you can give your creative side freedom without worrying where the next dollar is coming from.” — Kaz Hirai in a 2006 interview with 1UP.com.

The fundamental purpose of a game console is to provide a stable business platform for game developers, and in that regard Sony has achieved what they set out to accomplish with PS3. However, the PS3 and Xbox 360 have both been culprits in the long-standing graphical arms race which has driven consumer expectations and development costs through the roof.

The result has been massive uncertainty from developers who now often need to sell a million copies just to break even. Because of this, the will to take risks on new games and ideas has drastically decreased in the past five years. In Sony’s quest to build a “strong backbone” they accidentally built a rigid backbone that refuses to bend or flex to creative whims. Sony has supported a handful of indie developers with funds to create their passion projects, like Journey or Unfinished Swan. But these are the exceptions.

Verdict: False

“It’s probably too cheap… For instance, is it not nonsense to compare the charge for dinner at the company cafeteria with dinner at a fine restaurant? It’s a question of what you can do with that game machine. If you can have an amazing experience, we believe price is not a problem.” — Ken Kutaragi on PS3’s $600 price tag.

Former CEO Ken Kutaragi didn’t stay at the company very long after the underwhelming launch of the PlayStation 3, and statements like this illustrate precisely why. Kutaragi made numerous statements to this effect, including one odd moment when he suggested gamers would work longer hours at work just to be able to afford the PS3.

With respect to this specific quote, only hardcore PS3 fans would claim there is a large difference between the PS3 and Xbox 360. There may be more technical potential in the PlayStation 3 than in the Xbox 360, but over the past six years the difference has been practically indiscernible. If the software can’t take advantage of the added horsepower then the technical specs are pretty meaningless.

To put it in Kutaragi terms, the Xbox 360 is like eating at Sony’s cafeteria, then the cafeteria must serve filet mignon and crème brûlée every day. Not only was price a problem, it was the problem that tanked PlayStation 3.

Verdict: False

PS3 can run games at 120 frames per second, stream six channels of HD, and decode one thousand media thumbnails simultaneously. — Ken Kutaragi and Phil Harrison, in a translated interview with Nikkei BP and the PS3 E3 reveal respectively.

The most important thing to keep in mind while watching the PS4 reveal is that Sony has a track record of making incredible claims about the console that can’t really be verified. Maybe the PS3 can decode a thousand media thumbnails simultaneously, but can an end user verify that?

During the PS3 reveal Sony used these types of untestable claims to drum up excitement for the next generation of consoles, and to give gamers the general feeling that the PS3 was going to usher in a new era of technology. Unfortunately, all that power is meaningless when no game in the world takes advantage of it.

The PS3 is an extremely powerful piece of hardware, but seven years later we still don’t have games that utilize these sort of features.